All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Navigation

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to
use the classic discussion system instead. If you login, you can remember this preference.

But one of the three links wasn't Prairie folk... one had decolletage!

Some locals might think your comment prescient, as the latest adjustment to my beard [pm.org] does evoke some Amish comments (especially with a summer straw hat) from those who don't know what Amish beards really look like (ear-to-ear jaw-fringe). It's really more old Yankee (chin cover); consider the linked picture (which matches what you probably don't remember seeing a

There are a couple of real issues with indentation, but mostly in Python's favor.

Indentation without line noise is a major convenience for those typing with their voice or quite possibly other adaptive technologies.

Indentation without line-noise lacks the redundancy that braces and a "tidy" reformatter can provide, but gets a similar effect directly. Editors that have been trained to match brackets may have a harder time skipping back to

Not these eyes, alas. It was messing me up bigtime when I closed a bunch of blocks at once (if in a loop in a loop). No doubt I'll get used to it, but don't make the mistake of confusing familiar for intuitive. Nothing about these infernal machines is actually intuitive, and eyes can no doubt learn to see the invisible indents the same way that fingers can learn to hit the match-curly key sequence.

I've had new programmers revel in Perl the same way I've seen new programmers revel in Python.

As a new programmer I revelled in QBasic, but it doesn't meant that was a good language. Programming is fun, people can enjoy it in nearly any language. Maybe not COBOL... submitting batch jobs isn't satisfying. But all languages that aren't soul-eating are fun.

But new users aren't all equally successful in what they are trying to do. Moreso, they don't even know how to judge their success; they don't have

It wouldn't have helped with the fundamental issue in the example you mentioned (you probably got a "'module' object is not callable" error, there) but as far as working code is concerned, many modules contain useful examples in their test code. "help(StringIO)" tells you the file containing the StringIO module, and then you can read the "test()" function in there. In the same directory there is also a "test" subdirectory, which contains "test_StringIO.py". Those test files can also be worth looking at

http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall [telecommunity.com] - a simple package manager for automatic find/download/build/dependency resolution. For example, running "easy_install SQLObject" will search the Cheese Shop for the "SQLObject" object-relational mapping package, then download and build it for you, along with any dependencies it needs.

Anyone looking for the analog of Perl in some language, or at least the equivalent of Perl Cookbook recipes, should check out PLEAC [sourceforge.net], which is a (not always complete) translation of the Perl Cookbook into different languages (including Python)